Football season has me thinking. A good team has both a first class offense and a first class defense. Teams with one or the other don’t make the playoffs.

Coin collecting is a bit like building a good football team. Collectors need to know how to buy, but they also need to know how to sell. Many tend to ignore the selling part, but they do so at great cost to themselves and their heirs.

If a collector does not know how to sell, he is at the mercy of strangers. I get calls from frustrated heirs who need help and don’t know how to get it. I know they have a problem, but there are not enough hours in the day for me to do my job and run a coin selling consulting service. I have to refer heirs to their local coin dealers, and tell them they need to prepare for the encounter by getting some books and price guides to try to get a ballpark idea of what they have. It isn’t easy for them.

If you are a collector who hasn’t worked on a sales game, it is time to start. Sell something, anything. You choose. Then pick the method you want to sell it.

Like the shampoo directions, lather, rinse, repeat, you do this over and over again until you are good at it. Then you can rest easy that you will get maximum value for your holdings when the time comes.

Where do you go to sell? Well, consider the following:

A collector can drop by the local coin shop and do a deal right on the spot. Not every locality has a coin shop, so that may not be the way to go.

Collectors can visit local coin shows as they occur. Some areas have monthly shows. Others have annual shows in the VFW Hall, or other convenient spot. Checking the Show Directory in Numismatic News for your area should reveal shows just about every weekend within easy driving distance.

There is the Internet  auction alternative. Many buyers of the First Spouse gold coins turned right around and offered them on eBay even before they received delivery of the coins.

Coins can be offered for sale to advertisers in Numismatic News. Give them a call, send them an e-mail or even write them a letter to tell them what you have and what price you might be looking for. These dealers might buy. They might not. They are busy. There are some dealers who run regular buy ads, so this would be the place to start.

Other Numismatic News readers like the free classified ads that are given to subscribers. They enjoy the give and take. (It is as much fun to read what is for sale as it is to offer something for sale to others.)

Collectors with larger holdings have even more options. They can consign their holdings to auction companies. They can ask a major dealer to meet them to discuss a purchase.

Like a good football team, you need to practice both parts of the game, buying and selling, to maximize your hobby performance.

My job of delivering news to collectors is an ever challenging one. One aspect of it is to determine how much information is too much and how much is too little. That is not as easy as you might think.

Consider some phone calls last week. One had to do with the Metals section on Page 4 that Numismatic News publishes every week. When markets are moving, collectors want to know what the reference point is. Advertisers put caveats in their print ads that bullion coin prices are subject to change without notice because of daily fluctuations.

The prices on Page 4 provide a useful reference point as to what prices prevailed as the paper was being put together. Gold, silver, platinum and palladium have been there for years. In recent months staff decided to add nickel, copper and zinc because of all the stories we have been running when these base metals were hitting new highs.

A phone caller asked what unit of weight was being quoted. I was startled. I admit I wanted to joke that gold isn’t sold by the quart, but I didn’t. The caller had a good question. Everyone has to find out this information at some point, but I had not figured on the possibility that even with the many published stories this year, someone would not know that copper, zinc and nickel trade by the avoirdupois pound and gold, silver, platinum and palladium trade by the troy ounce.

Another caller said he had driven 500 miles to Wyoming for a debut of that state’s quarter because of a box on the Mint Statistics page that said, “Wyoming Quarter Release: Sept. 4, 2007.” The caller interpreted that as the ceremony date when it fact it was the date the coins were released to the banking system and when the Mint began to sell bags and rolls.

When that box has been dropped out occasionally for space reasons, I get called by another reader who tells me he relies on that box.

What to do? It is simply a signal to me that my work is never done. Every week is a new one with a potentially new audience and I must do my best to keep the veterans engaged and yet help bring others along on the grand ride that is this hobby.

I had a head of steam up this morning to get to the office to write this blog. My chosen topic was gold going over $700 a troy ounce. I had scanned the headlines before I went home yesterday. They heralded the move. I didn’t look at them in depth.

I come in this morning to find out that gold did not really close above $700 yesterday. Spot gold was $695.30. That is certainly a healthy increase from the $673 price it closed at last week, but it wasn’t the magic $700.

What closed over $700 was a futures contract for delivery of gold. I don’t want to denigrate the importance of a futures contract, but when most people hear or see something, they think it applies to the here and now. Nowadays, though, you have to always look for the fine print or the gotcha line.

Less and less news seems to follow what I consider to be the basic understanding that news is what happens, not what might happen. Nowadays it is always something potentially dangerous that has been found in our food, our water, our air, that could very well kill us all and we had better watch to find out just what it is. If you happen to watch, you often discover it is just a story hyped to get ratings larded with suppositions rather than actual fact, so fewer of us watch.

Today’s gold trading may very well bring the spot price to close over $700. It is trading in that area as this is written. That would be the first time this has happened since May 12, 2006. This is significant in its own right. It should be ballyhooed when it happens.

It seems to me that yesterday’s headlines simply were jumping the gun.

Gold and other precious metals were on my mind for a time during the Labor Day weekend. After the hot dogs, corn on the cob and the lawn mowing were over, I updated my price log.

I haven’t done this since July 20, what with the preparations for the American Numismatic Association convention and its aftermath, including a vacation.

While this is a purely mechanical process and some might think unnecessary in the computer age, it gives me a chance to play with the numbers and think about them. I have been doing this on an off for almost 40 years, starting when I delivered the Des Moines Register in 1968.

What I find interesting about the numbers in the latest period is that gold ended almost where it began. On July 20 it was at $683.90 a troy ounce. On Aug. 31, it was $673. Yes, that is down $10.90, but that is hardly a blip on the radar in a market that fluctuates every business day.

What was more interesting was platinum and silver. They were significantly weaker. Platinum dropped by 5.78 percent in the period while silver was down 9.4 percent.

People who pay attention to the financial markets know how rocky it was for the stock and bond markets and they might conclude that the weakness in bullion was due at least in part to the turmoil on the world’s financial markets. That seems to be a logical conclusion.

Another interesting tidbit is that the metals are reasonably close to where they were one year ago. Platinum is about $20 higher, silver is less than a dollar lower and gold is nearly $50 higher. That might qualify them as being stable, especially in a trading environment where they can jump up or drop that annual difference in just a day or two.

Some numismatic collecting seasons are overshadowed by what bullion is doing. This doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Three up, three down. I feel like a baseball announcer. The Jefferson First Spouse half-ounce gold pieces that depict the Liberty Head design of the 1800-1808 half cent sold out in around two and a half hours yesterday.

This was the third offering in the series. Collectors snapped up 20,000 proofs at $429.95 each and 20,000 uncirculateds at $410.95.

The race to put them on eBay has begun.

Buyers seemed to have turned the purchase process into a competitive sport, trading tips online as to how to game the system. Profit, of course, is the underlying motive, but there have been enough studies of individual behavior during auctions that I have to ask the question whether at least some of the buyers have completely lost sight of the basic question: does anybody really collect these?

It is a game to buy them. It is a game to send them in to a grading service to get an MS-70 or Proof-70 grade attached. It is a game to describe them in terms that will most appeal to what seem to me to be unsophisticated potential buyers.

However, all games end. Prices for the Martha Washington coins and the Abigail Adams coins are in decline. I had an e-mail this week asking what was going on with MS-70 Marthas, meaning why are prices falling?

Perhaps holders of these coins are starting to feel like owners of subprime mortgages. Owning them may pay off over time, but then again, discretion is the better part of valor.

Every buyer should examine the gold American Eagle series. Most of the coins trade basically as bullion pieces. The proof pieces have flatlined with a few notable exemptions. The same is likely to happen to the First Spouse coins.

Gold coins that do not rise in value tie up a lot of money. Investors and other profit seekers are not emotionally tied to the process of actually assembling a set and being proud of owning it.

It will be interesting to watch what happens to prices on eBay. There is enough of a shipping delay from the U.S. Mint that the coins may not gain much traction. Both have projected delivery dates in October. We’ll see.